Über-Twitter

Admittedly, as my ex-colleague, N. M. (not his real name) has pointed out, twitter can be used for far more than merely following celebrities from their bathrooms to their cars to their studio. Or wherever. In contrast to these trivial twitters, N. M. can create surprisingly erudite virtual groups which revel in their ability to express recursive witticisms or other philoso-mathematical comments, or reduce the essence of their ideas to 140 characters—which is already more than I can do with this essay only 1/3rd complete.

Of course, Mankind has always reveled in its ability to excel in limited forms:
Haiku and Sonnet are but two examples. Shakespeare excelled in the latter, for instance. But surely, he would have been severely limited had he not been able to write his magnificent plays, from Hamlet to Lear, from Richard III to Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. And we would have been robbed needlessly of these.

Similarly, Goethe excelled in lyric poems, but would have been stymied had he been forced to limit Faust to Twitter-length.

I shudder to think of what would have happened to Mankind’s greatest heritages: Odyssey and Iliad, not to mention Mahabharata. Entire nations gained their identities for thousands of years from these epic poems. Please note the word “epic”.

In music too, lovely melodies were written in about twitter length, but where would Beethoven’s mighty symphonies have been had they been compressed to twitter? Not mention Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion (which, of course, I have just mentioned).

Twitter is neat, twitter is witty, twitter apparently can create kindred groups. But could these groups not be created otherwise? I challenge a twitter group to respond to this essay twitterwise. But even if they could, they should also explain why.

Of course, people climb Mt. Everest “because it’s there”.

Why ever(est) not?

Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian; or maybe even in Russian or Eskimo

Ever since I learnt the name Shakespeare back in Hungary, I have heard from my erudite Hungarian friends that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian translation than in the original.

At first blush the argument sounds impressive. On second, on a deeper analysis, I am not even sure what it means. A translator has translated “better” than Shakespeare’s original? He or she has divined what the Bard had meant to say and said it better in Hungarian? (or Russian or in Eskimo?). That is hubris or Chutzpah beyond belief. Surely, even the translator cannot believe what his acolytes, or supporters attribute to his translations.

But let us for a moment assume that the above is the case: Reading side by side a few selected excerpts, in English and Hungarian, and the Hungarian “sounds better”. How many of those who claim superiority to the translated version speak good enough English to pass judgement. In my experience very few. But even if the Hungarian version “sounds better”, does that mean that that is how Shakespeare wanted it to sound? Surely, he was acknowledged as the greatest practicer of the English language. Who is to say that he did not want it to sound the way he wrote it?

But let us go one step further, let us assume that the poor Bard had a bad day, did not turn out the best Sonnet, one or two out of several hundred. He needed the help of the great Hungarian translators who “improved” on his English (according to the disciples). What does this prove? That the translator is a better poet? Or that if he has several days to perfect a single sentence in Hungarian, that it now is superior? After all, Shakespeare did not spend weeks on a single line of a Sonnet, and wrote his plays extremely fast. Is it surprising that a Petofi or an Arany, or Arpad Toth (great Hungarian poet/translators) can make some of his plays in 19th century Hungarian “sound better” than Shakespeare’s 17th century English. Though, I repeat, of my acquaintances who repeat the mantra that Shakespeare sounds better in Hungarian, not one has read the originals in their entirety.

This belief will persists, because it supports some psychology of the believer that I do not understand.